Please Tell Me About It

Abstract

We introduce a conversational social robot designed for long-term in-home use to help with loneliness. Our simple design leverages techniques from psychology to encourage self-reflection and promote wellness. To increase feasibility, we pay special attention to simple and robust robotic interaction, avoiding complex behaviors that may be prohibitively complex (i.e., possible in lab but not deployable) or unpredictable (e.g., generated speech saying something inappropriate). We present a novel robot behavior design to have simple self-reflection conversations with people to improve wellness, while still being feasible, deployable, and safe.